EMC pellets are a source of contamination in clean IC manufacturing environments because they can crumble and thus generate epoxy mould compound dust. It is highly desirable therefore to locate an EMC pellet supply or a moulding machine as much as possible outside the clean environment of the machine so as to reduce the amount of epoxy mould compound dust that may be generated within that environment from such pellets.
Thus U.S. Pat. No. 5,656,305 (Venrooij), for example, discloses a system for dosed conveying and selecting of pellets for a moulding apparatus for lead frames in which a supply-feed device and in-feed and selection device of the system are located in a housing in order to obtain a separation between a high dust level and a low dust level environment. This system selects and successively conveys pellets one by one to a transporting path which extends outside the housing. Towards the end of the transporting path and in the low dust level environment, the pellets are individually braked, separated and then transferred to carrier which conveys them to a mould of the moulding apparatus. The system of this U.S. Patent however is quite complex because of the individualisation of the pellets at the supply-feed end and through to their conveyance into a mould, which necessitates the provision of specialist equipment, particularly for the moulding machine. It does not address the supply of EMC pellets to a conventional automatic moulding machine having a pellet feeder bowl that is inbuilt into the automatic moulding machine.